Cameron McDonald: Creating Space for Good Luck

In this episode of Team Climate, we're joined by Cam McDonald, Sales Director at Voltus, DER Task Force member, Terra.do fellow, and passionate mentor helping others pivot into climate careers. Cam walks us through his personal journey, sharing how he successfully leveraged years of SaaS sales experience—including building and leading sales and account management teams—to land a meaningful role modernizing the electrical grid. At Voltus, Cam's work directly supports grid flexibility, demand response, and the transition to cleaner energy.

Transcript

The planet, we're big fans, and it needs some help. We're going to skip the part where we convince you that humans have caused a tremendous change in the climate since roughly the 1700s. We're also going to skip over a bunch of terrifying statistics and doom and gloom stories.

We know you've heard all of that. We are regular people, you might say climate curious, that want to help and don't know where we can jump in yet. Welcome to Team Climate, a show about what it really looks like to do climate work.

This is real, and this is bigger than all of us, and it's going to take all of us to change it. My name is Jeffrey Brian Potter. I'm a senior product designer in the FinTech space.

My co-host, Kristen Shaw, is the head of growth for a consulting agency and the national marketing chair for a clean tech accelerator. Each episode, we're going to be talking with someone in the field, doing the real work it takes to make change. We hope this inspires you to jump in too, because we're going to need you.

Hey, team, welcome back, and thanks again for joining us here at Team Climate. We're gonna be speaking with Cameron McDonald today. He's a sales director at Voltus, a sustainable electricity company based in New York.

He's also the founder of Green Beta, a climate coaching business that he started to help people transition to their climate careers. So he's a really bright guy with a lot of great things to say. So let's get to work.

Cameron, welcome. Thank you for joining us. How are you today?

I'm good. Yeah, it's good to be here.

Awesome. I appreciate you jumping in. Where are you coming from?

I live in Brooklyn.

Oh, cool.

Park Slope, if you're familiar with the area at all.

Nice. How is the weather there today?

It's spectacular today. I feel like for the last five years, if you talk to New Yorkers in the spring, we've always lamented like, we've had this very consistent pattern of it being gorgeous during the week and then disgusting as soon as the weekend arrives. For the last two weeks, the pattern has flipped and we've had a couple of gorgeous weekends despite some very gloomy and rainy weeks

So, yeah, the vibes are high right now.

Nice.

New York in the spring, very optimistic time of year.

Nice. Nice. So you are actually a switcher.

You know, there's new people trying to get into climate from school or from just coming into the workforce. And then there's people pivoting. And yes, you are a pivoter.

So tell us a little bit about Voltus.

So Voltus is, we are what's called a demand response aggregator. So our job essentially is to help support the electric grid via demand response programs, which essentially will pay large consumers of electricity to reduce power consumption during grid emergencies. So anytime there's a lot of strain on the grid, think like a particularly hot summer day when everyone's cranking their AC.

Grid operators and utilities will pay Voltus, who then pays businesses to, like I said, to reduce power consumption. And in the process, we reduce strain on the grid, and probably more importantly, we give the grid the ability to level out the demand curve such that they can better incorporate renewables onto the grid. You know, as we all know, the big challenge with renewable sources of energy is that their generation is intermittent and inconsistent, right?

And so as the grid increasingly relies on an inconsistent supply curve, they need tools that can help them create an equally variable demand curve. And Voltus is an important lever that they can pull to achieve that goal.

I actually bought a singular solar panel, and I put it on my patio. It's working, and it's really cool, but when I plug it in, I can charge my laptop off of it. But then it's like inconsistent.

It's like charging, not charging, charging, not charging. It like flickers the whole day. Yeah.

It's funny, actually, that balcony solar, as it's referred to in the industry, is a very big thing in certain parts of Europe. I think Germany probably has the most balcony solar at the moment. It's not very big in the US yet, but glad to hear, Jeffrey, that we've got someone leading the charge.

I'm leading the charge. See what you did there. So, how do you fit in to that?

I work on our sales team in the NISO market, and my job essentially is to go out and enroll large consumers of power, so primarily commercial and industrial customers. In New York City, it's mostly commercial real estate. In the rest of the state, it's a lot of manufacturing, healthcare facilities, cold storage businesses, anything that's consuming a lot of power.

Bitcoin mines, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your perspective on that industry, are a big customer segment for us. We are trying to figure out how to incorporate data centers. Obviously, depending on the type of data center, their ability to curtail load will be more or less, depending on what that data center is being used for.

So yeah, I'm out there proselytizing the gospel of demand response and trying to get customers bought in.

I think you're fairly new to it, right?

Yeah. So I've been in the energy space now for right around a year. I've been at Voltis for about seven months of that.

So I had a bit of a unique transition into the space, spent the first 10 years of my career doing nothing helpful or useful for the climate or really anyone other than my bank account and the bank account of whoever my CEO was at the time, and then got into the energy industry, like I said, about a year ago, got convinced a company to take a shot on me, was really liking my time there. But I actually ended up getting poached by Voltis for an opportunity that just turned out to be a better fit for the type of work that I like to do and all that. So yeah, it's been a short run so far, but it feels like I've been in it for a couple of years, just based on the pace of learning and how quickly things have scaled for me personally since joining the industry.

So yeah, short run, but a good one so far.

I bet a lot of people are having that exact parallel journey. So what sort of tip the scales for you, as you said, to go from paycheck to what you're passionate about?

In a way, my hand was forced. So I actually got fired from my last non-climate tech job, and it turned out to be an incredible blessing, but it was, in the moment, the first real professional setback I ever faced in my career. The first decade roughly of my career was a pretty linear trajectory, up and to the right in terms of responsibility, and the money I was making, and my standing, so to speak, in the industry that I was in, which for the bulk of that time, I was in the marketing technology space.

Without even realizing it, I started to burn out. I was someone that had always taken the approach to my career, that I was agnostic to what the company that I was working for was actually aiming to do. I never really cared about the product that I was selling, I just cared about, am I making good money?

Do I like the people that I'm working with? Did I feel challenged? Did I have an opportunity to get promoted?

Those things. As long as those boxes were checked, I was good. And I think as I got deeper into my career and got a little bit more just financially stable and the money felt, not that it was less important, but just that you adapt to making good money, and so then it just feels like your new normal.

It feels less motivating, I guess, over time. I started to ask the more existential questions of like, what am I doing and why? And increasingly found no good answers.

And so, yeah, like I said, without realizing it, I think I kind of burnt out my job that I was working in at the time, noticed before I did. And they showed me the door. Oh, man.

And so the beauty of what happened next basically was for the first time since I left college, I had left one job without having the next one lined up. So it was the first time since I was 22 years old that I had the opportunity to really think critically about what do I want to do, right? What work can I see myself being happy doing in 10 years, right

And I pretty quickly landed on climate as a thing that I could pitch my wagon to that would allow me to have better answers to those existential questions. Well, at the same time, if I'm being honest, still having like a really solid financial outlook. My wife and I are probably a year out from our first kid, if everything goes according to plan.

I want to be able to take care of a family, and I want to be able to have decent answers when my kids inevitably ask me like, hey, a lot seems to be going wrong with the weather and the environment. Like, what were you doing back in the day to help solve some of this shit? So that was my tipping point.

It was a combination of my hand being forced to a degree, and then some hard thinking about where can I see myself in 10 years, where I feel like I'll look back and be proud of what I was doing now.

That's great to hear that you're concerned about money, that that's a real thing, and that everyone should. Frankly, there's money to be made. And from a completely capitalist point of view, there's real future in this.

Absolutely. I think just look at the macro forces that are driving my industry in particular, the energy transition space. We are, for the first time in two decades, experiencing real electric load growth in a way that the utilities are not prepared to keep up with.

And that even if they were prepared to keep up with, from a legislative standpoint and from a limitations of our ability to build physical infrastructure quickly standpoint, we could not keep up with. And so we need new solutions to make the existing infrastructure that we have more efficient. And the businesses that exist like Voltis, to solve that problem are going to make a lot of money.

And the employees that work at those businesses have the ability to carve out a nice life for themselves while doing work that is mission critical for any chance that we have, and actually bending the curve, so to speak, from emissions and a climate change perspective

Let's take a quick break.

Transitioning to a greener economy could create 24 million new jobs by 2030, according to the International Labor Organization. And about 30% of roles in the climate space don't require technical expertise. Skills in marketing, sales, policy, business operations, or communications are in high demand.

That means your experience might already be more relevant to you than you think. If you're curious about diving into climate work, here are a few ideas to get started. Research and apply for roles in rapidly growing sectors like renewable energy, EV infrastructure, and carbon markets.

These areas are booming with opportunities for fresh talent. Volunteering with climate-focused nonprofits is a great way to build relevant experience, expand your network, and see firsthand what climate work looks like. And remember, networking is key.

Eighty-five percent of jobs are filled through connections. Communities like My Climate Journey, Work on Climate, and Terra.do are fantastic slack communities to meet like-minded individuals and learn from others already in the field. You can find the links in the episode notes.

Absolutely. So what was the process for you? Pretty typical resume, interview, application, blah, blah, blah, or was it a little more who you know?

Does that even exist in 2024 or 2025?

Right. Yeah, that's a fiction, right?

Yeah, it was not that at all. It was very much, one, doing a ton of learning, right? I had to first get a sense of like, you know, I think a lot of people start with the, I want to work in climate idea.

And after a couple of conversations and a couple of weeks of learning, the reality that you come to grips with is there is no such thing as working in climate, right? What there is is picking one industry that is under kind of the climate umbrella, right? Be it energy or food and ag or transportation or built environment or circular economy or whatever, right?

And becoming an expert in that one kind of niche. So there's a lot of learning on that front. And then, you know, meeting anyone and everyone who was willing to have a conversation with me, that, you know, is the combination of those two things that ultimately allowed me to make the transition.

And I would say the networking component even more so than the learning component. Though in a lot of ways, obviously, those two are tightly overlapped.

So absolutely. No, and I was going to mention that because you are obviously very knowledgeable about the subject matter. And, you know, six or seven months, you said, that's a lot of ramping up.

You must have done.

Yeah. And, you know, the reality is, like, I've been in the space professionally for a year. I started learning about it a year and a half ago, roughly.

Right. So like December 2023 is probably when in earnest, I decided like the energy space in particular is where I want to spend my time and where I want to build this next chapter of my career. So it's been, you know, it's been 18 months of pretty dedicated learning and, you know, networking and now obviously being in the space professionally, that's kind of the quickest way to ramp that learning.

So I've come a long way, but the longer you work in this industry, the more you realize that you know almost nothing. I still have conversations every single week, especially with colleagues at Voltis who are some of the smartest people that I've ever worked with. You know, I have conversations with these folks that make me feel like, man, I could spend the next 10 years working in this space and not fully come to grips with all of the nuance.

That's sort of comforting, actually, because there's never going to be a moment where you just know everything. And have your feet totally under you.

Even if you did catch up to it, legislation would change, regulations would change, needs of the market would change. The whole thing is different. Yeah, the fact that it is changing as quickly as it is, makes it incredibly stimulating intellectually.

And that is another huge part of the draw for me. Like I just, I naturally like learning about this stuff way more than anything that I did prior to getting into this industry. So, yeah.

Then, yeah, some office job or some cubicle job, like, oh, I guess. Totally. These people are richer than they were a month ago.

Yeah, I mean, I was working in the email marketing space for a good chunk of my career. And it's like, at a certain point, who benefits if Nike sells another pair of socks? Like, I don't know.

Does Nike even benefit?

Like barely.

So, you know, it's just...

I didn't even notice it.

That was never, never all that stimulating for me in the way that this is.

So here we are. Tell us about a typical day.

I spend the bulk of my day interacting with prospects and customers, right? So my job is a mix of both net new sales and existing customer management. So the vast majority of my time, I'm on the phone or on Zoom meetings with businesses that are participating in or interested in participating in demand response.

Yeah, honestly, the meat of the role in terms of what it's like selling at Voltis compared to selling at any of the companies that I worked for in my previous life, so to speak, it's not that different, right? It's cold calling, it's relationship management, it's networking, it's attending conferences, it's all of that stuff. But the big difference is that the conversations themselves are much more interesting, and a win for me as a salesperson in this role is also a win for, like, not to sound dramatic or like I'm patting myself on the back, but it's like a win for the planet, right?

It's a win for the energy transition. It's a win for, you know, our kids' generation. Say it again, Krissa.

But like sustaining human existence, basically.

Yeah, like, again, not to be dramatic, right? But it's like, it is each sale, so to speak, is a very, very, very small step in that direction, as opposed to my previous role, which was, you know, a very small step, you could argue in the opposite direction. So, in my mind, that's a, it's an order of magnitude difference.

Some people might call you a hero. I don't know.

My mom, maybe.

My cape is in the cleaners. So you get these prospects wanting to at least know more about the business. What kind of questions do you get?

I mean, the first and most important question they want to know is how much money am I going to make? Right? And that is, Jeffrey, to your point that you made when talking about the importance of this from a job hunter perspective, that there is real money to be made here.

Voltis actually makes a conscious decision to almost bury the lead on the sustainability impact of what we're doing when we're engaging with customers. Right? So our sales motion is fully centered around, we will make your business money.

Right? And then secondarily, it's like, by the way, by participating, you will also be supporting the stability of the electric grid. You will be pushing the energy transition forward.

You'll be avoiding carbon emissions.

Right?

And so if they tell us during the sale, that they care about any one of those things, we'll lean more into the sustainability piece. But if that doesn't come up, as it often doesn't, when we're dealing with the property manager of a commercial real estate building in New York City or the energy manager of a large manufacturer in upstate New York, if they don't care about that stuff, we're not going to focus all that much on it because our goal is not to sell them on the value of the sustainability element. Our goal is to sell them on the value of the programs, which we're going to do by convincing them that they're going to make a lot of money by participating.

And then in the process, we as a business are achieving our sustainability goals, which are clearly defined and are talked about in board meetings, at every all hands and are existing right along our financial goals as a double bottom line.

I think that's smart, especially these days. It's not going to register, it's not going to break through unless we're talking about making money and making a profit. And double, triple fold as well as traditional energy sources, so to speak, although that's a sliding scale, frankly.

But anyway, and then you have different tools in your toolbox to pull out if you're interested in this or that. 100%. So when you started, were there good people at your organization that were available for mentoring?

Absolutely. Yeah. Voltus is, it's impressive in a lot of ways, but I think maybe the thing that they do that is most impressive relative to their peer set of companies, is the amount of investment that they have made in onboarding and training.

Right? So Voltus, we're about a 200-person business, right? Still very much like startup ethos.

I've worked for Favon startups over the course of my career. I think universally, startups are not great at onboarding and training. It's typically very much like a get in here and figure it out type of culture.

Voltus, I would say, has made a concerted effort to avoid throwing people into the deep end and hoping that they learn how to swim. Instead, they've got an extremely robust onboarding and training program that allows folks like me who don't have relevant industry experience to come in and quickly get our feet underneath the bus and hit the ground running. So I know you asked about mentorship, but I think as important, frankly, is the ability for new folks, again, without that industry experience, to come in and just gain the procedural knowledge about how this industry works that allows us to leverage whatever existing skills we have to be useful to the business, to say nothing about all of the amazing human beings that are here that have been helpful to me along the way.

I think I always like to highlight that because I think there's a lot of lip service paid in the sort of climate community, to the idea of, you know, we need to bring in as many people into the industry as possible. But when the rubber meets the road, like no one's willing to hire folks without industry experience. And I think Voltus is kind of a, you know, a disruptor, so to speak, in that sense.

We have a ton of people at the company who this is their first ever time working in the energy space. And all of them are doing very well.

That's great to hear. And like they understand the sort of newness of it and want to give the people that industry experience, so to speak.

Yeah.

Yeah. And what do you find challenging about it?

There's a lot that's challenging about it, frankly. You know, the regulatory element of what we do is just extremely nuanced. You know, really getting a firm grasp of how power markets work, right?

How demand response programs are set up, right? So like to give you context, just within the state of New York, there are five or six different programs that we could theoretically enroll a given business into, each of which has their own rules, each of which has their own requirements, each of which pays differently on a different schedule, right? And that's just in one market, right?

There are nine wholesale power markets across the country that Boltus operates in, and all of them have vastly different offerings, at vastly different price points, with different rules and regulations. And so really feeling like you can wrap your head around all of that complexity and nuance is really challenging, right? Even still seven months in.

So that's one component of it. The other is, we are an aggressive, hard charging business with very lofty goals, right? And so the sales team is placed under, we are tasked with meeting a very high bar.

And like any good sales environment, if you do not meet that bar, your time will be fairly short lived, right? And so you got to live with that, that stress and that, that pressure. That part of it is something that I'm, you know, accustomed to, you know, being, having worked in sales now for 10 years, but you know, it never gets easy, so to speak.

So yeah, those are a couple of things I would call out. This sounds odd, but all of the difficulty that I experience in my day to day life at Voltis, frankly like pales in comparison to just the friction that I felt doing work that I didn't care about, right? Like it is so much easier to do hard shit when you feel like the impact of doing the hard thing is worth it.

So there's a lot that's hard, but none of it is as hard as just feeling like you're banging your head against the wall for eight hours a day, as I felt in my past life.

Understood. So let's drill down on impact. Maybe you know by numbers, but also sort of anecdotally, what kind of impact you've had.

Just today, like three hours ago, we had our weekly company All Hands, and they reported on sort of our environmental impact for the month of April, as they do every month. And we helped avoid 17 million metric tons of carbon going into the atmosphere in the month of April.

Nice.

So, you know, like that's one month. You know, we've got now almost 7 gigawatts of flexible load under our control as a business, which I think the conversion is that that's equivalent to about 700 gas peaker plants. Well, someone smarter than me at Voltis will double check that math for us.

But it is a very large number of gas peaker plants that we are essentially replacing and or allowing the grid or allowing grid operators to avoid having to build in the first place. So that is like tangible real world impact.

I'm unfamiliar with that term, a peaker plant.

So basically, the way that our grid historically has been set up, right, is centralized generation, which means very large gas, traditionally gas or coal-fired power plants, right, that are all of the generation is done in one place. And then we distribute that out through large-scale transmission and distribution infrastructure. And it's those largest plants that serve what's called base load, right, or the power demand that is placed on the grid, essentially 24-7.

And then there are what's called peaker plants that exist to serve in response to the peaks in demand that happen on particularly hot days or in particularly hot months, right? So these are smaller, typically gas-fired plants that are quicker to turn on and off, right, or quicker to connect to the grid that grid operators use, again, to meet those small peaks that occur much more infrequently. And so, voltus are big value to the grid and grid operators is, rather than having to turn on a gas peaker plant, right, to increase supply in line with those peaks in demand, they can go to voltus and pay us to instead smooth out the demand curve, right, such that they don't need to increase supply in real time to meet that peak.

So, that's kind of how that functions.

I want to go back to your impact personally, and something I've been watching since you pivoted into climate. You've been very active about helping other people pivot. I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what you're doing and the impact of that, and how that brings you joy and happiness and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah. This was not something that I really ever intended to do. So, the super quick story basically is once I landed my first job in the space, so around this time last year, I wrote one post on LinkedIn saying effectively like, hey, I just kind of successfully completed this transition.

It took me way longer than I thought it would. It was way harder than I thought it would be. I met a ton of really interesting people on the way, and I know that a lot of those people are trying to make the same transition that I just made.

Here's five important things that I learned along the way. If you're stuck, hit me up. I'm happy to talk to you and share any other learnings I have.

And that post just completely blew up in a way that I was not prepared for. I've now been pretty active on LinkedIn posting, I don't know, three to five times a week for the last year since that post. And still to this day, I think it's like in the top five or six of the most impressions I've ever generated on a post.

I literally had, I think, 80 or 90 people send me DMs saying like, hey, I'm trying to do what you're doing and I'm stuck. I would love your help. And so it was just this moment of like, oh, wow.

Okay. I mean, I guess I had a hunch, but that hunch has been really validated that there are a ton of people out there that need help. And so I just figured like, I don't know, maybe I'm not fully qualified for this, but clearly there's some value that I can add for folks.

So I started sharing more of those learnings on LinkedIn, trying to kind of tell my story and share things that really helped complete that transition. And then I had a guy approach me and ask for more like dedicated help, which then turned into me taking on a number of kind of one-to-one clients. And then after I did that for like five months, I actually had a buddy who I went through Terra with, who reached out to me and said that he wanted to start doing some coaching himself.

And then we kind of had the idea of rather than us each doing this one-to-one model, where we help individual people, like why not kind of combine our efforts and create something that could be more of a one-to-many, or I guess a two-to-many approach. So yeah, so now we're working on building a community for folks that want to make this transition and need a boost, right? And need some learning.

So yeah, at this point, I've helped, I don't know, dozen or so folks land jobs in the climate space. And that, yeah, it feels awesome. Again, it wasn't something I ever set out to do, but as it turns out, I've got some ability to, I guess, communicate things in a way that has helped some folks unlock progress that they weren't seeing otherwise.

Well, I think that's like, I wanted to highlight that, because I feel like that's kind of indicative to the whole climate space, right? It's still a baby industry, right? If you look at it holistically, and it's still in that highly collaborative phase.

And so, once you're in, if someone, anyone else shows interest, you're like, come, let me show you. I will help you with whatever you need. And then, that person finds their way, and kind of turns around and does the same thing for a couple more people.

And it's one of my favorite things of kind of pivoting out of tech into the climate spaces. I mean, I don't know if you feel this in your sales job, because I know sales is highly competitive, but just spending my days with people who, it's not kill or be killed, right? It's not a zero-sum game right now.

It's people diligently working as hard as they can, willing to collaborate and to steal something that I heard at an event at San Francisco Climate Week. It's kind of like the hardened warriors who are going to make it through, and there seem to be a lot of us. So I just wanted to call that out.

I get a little gushy about this part of the experience. But yeah, thank you for doing that for people, because it's amazing.

I love that you called it out, and I could not agree more. I was gobsmacked when I was going through my transition, at the generosity of folks working on these problems. I tell people all the time, because this is a big part of now what I coach people on, networking in climate is entirely different from any other networking experience you've ever had.

I'm not kidding. I probably had a 60 percent success rate on pure cold outreach to people on LinkedIn, saying like, hey, I'm interested in learning more about what you're doing. Would you give me 15 minutes?

I was truly just like shooting shots in the dark, and like 50 to 60 percent of people were like, yeah, happy to. And I built connections with people that I'm still like friends with, and people that were legitimately helpful to me along the way. And so yeah, I could not agree more.

I think when you are working on solving these problems, you pretty quickly recognize we do need as many people on board if we're going to actually make any significant progress. And so if you're out there and you're listening to this and you have any trepidation about networking, because it feels like a four-letter word and it makes you itchy and uncomfortable as it does for most people, just know that it will feel much more like meeting friends at a party than it does like wearing a badge at a conference and trying to figure out what you can get out of people.

I had dinner. I'm going to hijack and talk about myself for one second. But at DC Climate Week, last week or two weeks ago, I had dinner with someone that I would consider a friend now, that I have known for over two years, that I've never met in person.

But we connected early in my climate transition. She was a little bit ahead of me, and we've stayed in touch and tried to be helpful to each other this whole time, and we actually met in person. And it was like meeting an old friend from school.

We saw each other, we hung out, we had dinner that night. It was amazing.

Well, there is that shared ethos, right? I think that's why you feel that sense of familiarity with people, is you understand everyone that's working on these problems is doing so intentionally. It is not an industry that people trip and fall into the way so many industries are.

My entire professional experience post-college was like, oh, you're willing to hire me? Great. I'll come work for you.

Versus now, it's like I had to stop, think about it, put a bunch of effort in, and make it happen. And that is the case for 99.9 percent of people working on solving these problems. And so there is that sense of shared ethos and shared understanding that I do think just makes it, to your point, Kristen, feel instantly familiar and allows you to connect with people on a deeper level than any professional experience I've ever had prior, certainly.

One of my friends in Denver, John, when I first moved to Denver almost 10 years ago, he's like, you know why I wanted to be your friend? Because we kept running into each other in networking stuff. And he's like, because you said, oh, I just really like balancing a little plate of carrot sticks on my knee.

That's why I come to all these events.

That's a good line.

So you've actually sort of built a little consultancy or coaching business or nothing that formal?

So yeah, it started as just a coaching business, you know, helping people, helping individuals who would reach out to me. And now we've got, you know, it's my partner Colin Bryan and I are building a community, right? So it's basically, it's a combination of, we've created a bunch of content that is designed to sort of allow folks to self-serve their way through all of our key learnings of how to do this transition well, right?

So like literally breaking down the steps of like, how do you find your niche? Once you find your niche, how do you network within that niche? How do you do effective cold outreach on LinkedIn?

How do you turn those networking conversations into referrals? Whatever it is. We break down all of that learning.

We give that to people and then we put them into smaller accountability groups. So you've got four or five people that are going through the journey with you. You share your learnings each week.

You talk about what's working, what's not. And then we do weekly office hours where they can come and pick my and Colin's brains on any points in which they're getting stuck. And then we bring in guest speakers.

So other folks who have successfully made the transition, people who can share interesting insights and learnings. So yeah, there's a little time commitment to it for the folks that are involved. But our goal essentially is to help as many people as possible who want to work in climate.

We want to give them the road map to make it happen.

Do you have a name for it? I want to make sure we mentioned that.

Yeah, it's probably worth calling out. Thank you, Jeff. It's called the green beta.

So if you're at all familiar with climbing, you probably heard the term beta, which means like, it's essentially like advice on the steps to take to complete a particularly difficult climb. So thus the green beta, we view this transition, it's kind of like climbing a mountain. So we want to give people the route to take to get there.

That's awesome. I'm glad you didn't go with Sherpa. I think that it's been very overused.

There's a lot of that. That Sherpa and the other. Yeah.

Yeah.

We also tried to not have the word climate in it, which was tough, not for any reason other than there's just so many businesses with that name in there, and we're trying to do something a little bit different. So, yeah, we're happy with what we landed on. We'll see if it holds.

Can you think of a time, either in this consulting work or in your work work, you've had a challenge that you didn't think you could overcome, and then you did.

There were certainly a bunch of moments along the process of transitioning into climate that I wasn't sure I was going to be able to do it, but especially early on when, before I had picked energy as the niche that I wanted to focus on, I felt like I was floundering around for a period of two and a half months, networking with people and applying to stuff randomly and just not really getting anywhere. And I was like, I don't know, maybe I don't have the chops or I don't have the resume to make this happen. Once I got focused and I could start to feel some momentum, that mindset changed.

But yeah, there were moments there where I was like, God, do I just need to go get a job at Salesforce or something and like accept defeat? You know, thank God I didn't. But that was one thing.

Again, I still have moments of like, am I ever going to like really deeply understand the nuance of the power markets and the regulations and how capacity payments are calculated and all of the nuance that exists within the industry that I've chosen to spend the foreseeable future working in. There are some very, very smart people that I work with who even they will tell you, you can work in this space for 10 years and not fully wrap your head around it. And so, yeah, that continues to be a challenge, but it's at least a fun challenge.

So, you mentioned sort of being out there and getting comments and kind of getting in the mix on LinkedIn and social media and stuff. Negative stuff? Have you had to deal with that?

And how do you interact?

Yeah. I mean, I get the occasional random LinkedIn comment from like a, I assume, MAGA-adjacent guy who's like, you're wasting your time, bro. Drill, baby, drill or whatever.

Yeah.

That I would say is very few and far between. The big, more common thing that I get is just like the side eye from people that I know or other folks in my life who view any element of putting yourself out there on social media as cringy and lucky in the sense that I'm shameless. And so that doesn't bother me all that much, frankly.

You know, I'm kind of comfortable doing things that other people might feel are a little embarrassing at times or overly, like, I don't know, vulnerable in public spheres. And so, no, really not much negative stuff at all. You know, the response overwhelmingly is very positive.

And even people that I've never, you know, spoken with, I'll get one or two DMs a week of people just saying like, hey, man, I just wanted to say, like, your content has been really helpful to me. Or like, it's, you know, I'm feeling more confident now after I tried one or two of the things that you suggested, things like that, small messages that just, you know, I think one of those could drown out like a hundred shitty comments from people. Yeah, right?

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's 99.9% really positive.

Your work, it's a work from home situation? You have an office?

Yes. You know, Voltus is fully remote. So we are, you know, I work primarily from my one bedroom apartment here in beautiful Park Slope.

Luckily, because I'm, you know, I'm in sales and all of my customers and prospects are in the state of New York, I do get to get out in the field, so to speak, a good amount, which helps with like the Zoom fatigue and just, you know, feeling a little bit less like a hamster on a wheel. As work from home can sometimes start to feel like that's the setup.

Have you spoken to your building about getting more solar?

You know, that's an interesting question. I have not. We live in a condo building.

So our landlords just own our unit. It's not like a co-op or anything, you know, or one of those like high rises with a big management company. So, no, it's not something that I've approached anyone about.

I'm not frankly sure who I would approach to have that conversation.

So, not to cut into your other business. I'd love to ask, like, if you have a piece of advice for someone trying to swing into climate, what would it be?

I guess I would say, if it's okay with you guys, I probably have three things that I talk about the most with people. Awesome. So one is the importance of finding that niche, which we've alluded to a couple of times now.

It's totally fine to use, I want to work in climate as your starting point, but pretty quickly I would say, you should view it as a goal to find some specialty or some industry, some problem set within the broader climate ecosystem to focus on. It's the only way you'll be able to do the deep learning that's required to be useful in an interview and ultimately be useful to a business that's looking to hire someone. That's the first thing I would say.

The other thing I would say is figure out how to tell your story. You are going to... I give the advice that networking is the most important thing you can do, but I think that that's trite at this point

Everyone, I think, knows that. So within that context, to network effectively, you need to be able to tell your story in a way that is compelling and concise and sticks with people and helps them understand who you are and why you are potentially useful to a business or to a company that's looking to hire folks. I actually have a couple of posts that I've written that sort of break down almost like a formula for how to construct a story that is compelling and does those things so folks can check out my page or just Google my name and how to tell your story on Google.

You'll probably see one or two of those posts pop up. And then the last thing that I would say, again, it's kind of trite at this point, but the value of doing this work in public I think just cannot be overstated. We talk about it in the green beta community through this concept of creating surface area for good luck, right?

Meaning every time you post something on LinkedIn, every time you share a project with someone that you're working on, every time that you go to a networking event, you are creating these opportunities for good things to come to you without you sort of creating them from whole cloth, right? So the more that you can put yourself out there, again, whether that's on social media or in-person stuff or any other channels that are available to you, the more that you create surface area for opportunities to find you. And I think, like, my own kind of arc into this world really speaks to that.

And I've just seen it over and over again that people will, you know, spend six months applying for 100 jobs. And then it's, you know, a random person that they meet in an event who ultimately becomes the referral that gets them the job that they've been looking for, or it's, you know, one post that they write on LinkedIn that opens up a door that they weren't expecting. And there you go.

I think of it like when you're a kid and you're doing your homework at the kitchen table, you know, and your parents are finally like, oh, he needs a desk in his own space, that he doesn't have to clear, you know, to make room for dinner, you know, and you have to make literal space in your life for the things that you need, you know?

Yeah.

I think it's great. I think thank you so much for the advice, and I agree with everything that you said. I think I'm going to sign up for your community just because I want to be part of it.

So I already went to the website, so make sure you let me in.

Of course.

I'm interested as well. Yes.

I just think you've made tremendous progress in the last year. Super impressive. Very, very proud and impressed with the work you've done, and even more proud and impressed with how much you're giving back to the community already after just pivoting a year ago.

Well, Krista, I mean, you know this, but you're a big part of why I'm doing that. We connected in week three post me getting fired and deciding that I wanted to do this crazy thing to pivot into climate. And you were extremely helpful to me despite no prior relationship and frankly no incentive to you to be helpful.

And that kind of set the table for me. You proved to be one person in a very long line of people that would ultimately help me out and pull me along throughout my journey. And so, yeah, it is in no small part a testament to you that I'm now trying to do the same and kind of return serve for the next person in line.

Thank you.

That's so lovely.

We started this as a conversation about there is, I mean, Kristin and I started this like a year ago, about there isn't a good show about people working in climate. And like, it could really benefit from like a workplace sitcom about, you know, somebody that installs solar panels or whatever. So if your work was a workplace sitcom, who would play you?

Oh my God. Wow. Okay.

I was not expecting that question. So if I'm going like off of the, just the look, there's actually my, I get a very niche celebrity doppelganger as a very pale, very blonde man. There's a guy who was in, I think he was in the original cast of Rent on Broadway, and then was subsequently in the movie for Rent.

Yeah.

Hold on. I need to find this real quick. His name, Anthony Rapp.

Oh yeah.

If you Google Anthony Rapp, we have a similar aesthetic. I do think that blonde men get profiled and lumped together as one homogenous group, but that's a conversation for another time. If I was going off of the personality or the vibe that I'm hoping to curate, I would say maybe someone more in the, like an Owen Wilson almost, like I'm kind of goofy and I try not to take myself too seriously, try to have a good time with the stuff that I'm doing.

I love that. So maybe those two. I don't know.

Take your pick.

I'd watch that show. They would get into some shenanigans, man.

Yes.

Although I've heard Owen Wilson is quite a skateboarder. That is not my vibe.

But anyhow. Now I definitely want to watch this show. All right.

Exactly.

Cameron, it's a pleasure and boy, big inspiration and we really appreciate your time. So thank you so much. And anything else you wanted to to mention before we jump off?

No, thank you guys so much for having me. This was really fun. And I'm so glad that you guys are doing this because I think, to your point, there are so many really interesting, really thoughtful, really kind and funny people doing great work in all corners of the climate ecosystem.

And I'm excited to see more of the folks that you guys profile. So thanks for having me.

Thank you. Have a nice night.

Bye bye.

Bye bye.

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